Marc Chagall, 1942

Arnold Newman

To pay his way through college, Arnold Newman took a job at a portrait studio in a Philadelphia department store. After taking dozens of âdo-it-by-numbers portraitsâ (as the artist referred to them), Newman decided to âexperiment with photographing people where they live or where they work, to say something about each individual.â These so-called experiments became some of the most arresting portraits of the 20th century. In his early portrayal of Marc Chagall (1887â1985), for example, Newman places the artist before a painting, carefully incorporating Chagallâs characteristically poetic imagery into the photograph and placing it on an equal standing with Chagall himself. In this way, Newman subsumes the painterâs features, tousled hair and intense, almost skeptical gaze into the fabric of the canvas behind him.